Linden Lab have blogged about a couple of important issues that could impact your enjoyment of Second Life. One is about account security, which is very important and the other is about potential warnings when you try to install Second Life, which contains helpful knowledge.

It has come to our attention that some Residents are sending messages – which may appear as popup windows in some viewers – informing other Residents that their accounts have been compromised and encouraging them to contact Support, using a phone number that is not associated with Linden Lab.

These messages are phishing attempts to gain access to your Second Life account. Neither Linden Lab, nor Second Life Customer Support, would attempt to contact you in this manner.

Please make sure you are aware of this issue, the blog post from Linden Lab contains links to support, so it’s well worth taking a look at the post.

The warning takes the form of telling you that Second Life is an unrecognised app and appears as a blue warning box.

The reason for this warning appearing now is due to Linden Lab’s digital signature requiring a new signing key, as the blog post explains :

Normally, we don’t get these warnings because for many years we’ve been digitally signing the viewer and its installer and Microsoft has been recording the fact that things signed by us have been installed many times by many users. Unfortunately, what Microsoft uses to recognize that the application is from Linden Lab is the code signing key we used to generate the signatures. That key expired this week, and we had to get a new one. Until enough people install the application signed by that new key, it won’t have a good enough “reputation” with Microsoft to avoid the warning.

The reputation of the key will improve as people install the Second Life viewer. I’ve seen similar issues with anti-virus programs being wary about new applications and again, this often requires a higher reputation for an app before security products recognise that it’s ok to install.

Whereas you should always be careful when such warnings appear, Linden Lab’s blog post should hopefully alleviate concerns about this warning when you’re installing then official Second Life viewer, so help yourself and your friends by reading the blog post if you have time.